When: October 29, 2018 @ 12:30pm
Where: PAB, WRF Data Science Studio, 6th floor
Dr. Michael Koss is currently funded through NASA satellite grants and resides in Kirkland, Washington. Prior to this he was an Ambition fellow in Zurich, Switzerland and a postdoctoral fellow in Honolulu, Hawaii. He obtained his PhD in 2011 from University of Maryland with a NASA fellowship where he worked on the Swift Satellite and balloon missions. He is heavily involved with NASA satellites and is part of the Swift BAT science team and the NuSTAR AGN science team as well as newly proposed X-ray missions such as Lynx, AXIS, and STROBE-X. More info about him and his research can be found at his personal website (https://www.michael-koss.com/).
The Swift BAT AGN Survey-14 Years of Surveying the Sky
The Neil Gehrel’s Swift Satellite was launched with a primary focus on localizing Gamma Ray Bursts using it’s on board X-ray and UV/optical telescopes. In the nearly 14 years since launch, Swift has expanded significantly beyond the realm of GRBs with an unequaled Target of Opportunity machine with rapid Xray/UV transient follow-up. The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) instrument on the Swift satellite has also surveyed the sky to unprecedented depth, increasing the all sky hard X-ray sensitivity by a factor of more than 40 compared to previous satellites. I will review the unique ability BAT has provided to survey AGN using the ultra hard X-rays. In particular, what insights does high energy selection of AGN provide about obscured black hole growth and its relation to the host galaxy, the AGN torus, and time variability of AGN. Finally, I will present the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS, http://www.bass-survey.com ) whose goal is to complete the first large (>1000) survey of hard X-ray selected AGN with X-ray properties, black hole masses and accretion rates, stellar masses, gas fractions, and radio properties.